I admire ‘no-nonsense’ Rawlings than any other Ghanaian president – Ransford Gyampo

Political Science lecturer at the University of Ghana, Prof Ransford Gyampo has spoken highly of former President Jerry John Rawlings describing him as one who had the guts to fix Ghana’s problems without looking back.

According to Gyampo, aside from his charisma, the late Rawlings showed that he had the guts to have things done without allowing bureaucracy to get in his way.

“I will tell you the truth without hiding it. Jerry Rawlings, I admire Rawlings more than all other past presidents of Ghana and I thought that I like him, I like his guts, his charisma, the fact that he is willing to fix problems as and when he finds them without going through needless bureaucratic bottlenecks and all that. I like him,” he said on Accra-based Starr FM.

Gyampo was being interviewed by Starr Chat host, Nana Aba Anamoah on Wednesday evening on the weekly personality profile show which GhanaWeb monitored.

The professor is on record to have spoken about the role that Rawlings played in a long lost but now found relationship with his father who fled the country during one of Rawlings’ military takeovers.

“And so when he (Rawlings) died, I thought of writing something nice about him, in fact, I was just thinking about it.

“So one day I was just sitting with my father just putting my thoughts together and he started talking about Rawlings and he said you see the relationship that hasn’t thrived so much between you and I, it is because of Rawlings because I had to run away and leave you,” he added.

According to him, his father who is currently 87-years-old and frail has been a British citizen for the past 42 years and has opted to stay more of the time in the UK for health reasons.

He, however, holds that as a Christian, he believed that the absence of his father when he was growing up toughened him up for life even though it meant that he tilted towards his maternal relations, but that he still liked and loved his father.

Rawlings died in 2020 from heart-related conditions and was given a full state burial early this year with his final resting place at the Osu Military Cemetery in Accra.

He remains Ghana’s longest-serving leader, serving about two decades in charge and being the first under the 1992 Constitution to serve two full terms as president before handing over in 2000 to John Agyekum Kufuor.